Yielding, Sincerity, Integrity
'Do not resist evil' through the lens of embodied practice
Caught as we are in the seasonal gales of bawling and chest-beating of barely literate tyrants, there is much we cannot hear. Where I live, this last week of storms has left the low tide strand scoured and giant boulders half the size of cars are strewn about the upper shore, going nowhere. Meanwhile, and for some months, I have been considering the three seemingly unpopular qualities after which I named this piece.1
On these Isles, both the pagan religions that arrived by foot over Doggerland or by boat across the North Sea, or via the newly formed English Channel, and the religions of One God that came here by curragh from Ireland, then by ship and plane, have a deep current in common: the communal telling of stories of great lives. At differing times, or at overlapping nights around the fire, tales of heroes, goddesses, gods, kings, saints and villains were told, and the way in which these tales could inspire or instruct were at each time largely held in common.2 The ground water of these tales were the one great aquifer common to our thousand islands. Springs sprung up differently here and there; a variant, a telling detail, a differing parentage, a new tale seeping in. But it was clear that self-sacrifice for family, friends, kin, village, or for your principles, to give hospitality to ordinary people, giving away what was precious to the down-trodden or the hungry, were seen as good and noble things. This is as common in ancient myths I have read and heard3 as it is in words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Until very recently, these qualities were seen as universally good amongst all but followers of Machiavelli.
Although overtly Christian tales supplanted much of the pre-Christian mythology, the themes of hospitality, self-sacrifice, living in harmony with the natural world and bringing down the mighty are a constant. Those who refuse to give hospitality, and put their own greed first, always come to a sticky end. Pride comes before a fall whether told in Latin by a slave in the lavish Romano-British Fishbourne Palace4 to the son of the Dominus in 85AD, just as it did in a Gaelic tale told on Uist in 1700, to the crofters’ daughter by her grandmother.
Here, just as the clear waters of wisdom had finally found widespread expression in tales of a thousand saints, many of whom had outlandish legends attached and inspired ten thousand pilgrimages, they too in their turn were stripped away by the Reformation. These were wild stories grown up in place, a symbiosis of Christianity and the fertile loam in which it was planted, (daughter of a million trees, screes and well-rotted animal bodies). Pilgrimage and the veneration of saints was outlawed by Henry VIII during the 1530s. Apart from strictly biblical tales, what was there to hang a good teaching story on, one that reflected the land and people themselves? Without permission to walk the land and experience first-hand the generosity of strangers, how could we learn something outside the transactional? A gift economy, seen as intrinsically ‘right’ by early Brythonic bard and venerable Mediaeval Abbess alike? Without the pilgrim option, we are already reduced to being serfs or landlords, workers or exiles upon the land. In pilgrimage, we are all equal as beggars, kings included. The land was sewn with story and each stitch was a footstep taken on a path because of a tale told.
So much was wrong with the Roman Catholic Church of that era, but what a price in art, life, custom, story, craft, holiday, song, dance, carnival, collective life, hospitality… was paid by all of us here thereafter. Everything accrued to the Crown. Anyway, you know the story, we are still stuck in it. This year our government cut heating payments to the aged and infirm, while planning to sell of parts of the NHS to neoliberal cronies in the States. They trample on the poor in the name of progress. Would that all who ruled us walked barefoot to St Wite’s ossuary and thought about the goodness of a Saxon woman whose wisdom in life and bravery in death still bring anonymous thousands to her tiny shrine each year for healing.5 Would that they wished for themselves such an afterlife in people’s hearts rather than filling their heads with soundbites ready for easy regurgitation.
I’ll stop complaining about others and admit, I too was not told stories nor given practices that would have given me the moral fibre to do the right thing in all, or even most, circumstances. I had to seek them out and I was lucky to find them, in the stories of my T’ai Chi lineage and in the Taoist Classics, in returning to certain Christian saints and Pagan myths. If I had stuck to what I read and saw around me growing up, and since, I would assume that winning was everything and kindness was a fault, just a bug in the human machine.
‘Do not resist evil’
6 That’s a long preamble to say that what I would like to speak of again, in a nutshell, is yielding. Below are some words adapted from a recent voice-letter to a friend, who is as interested in living well as I am, but who approaches it via a different path.7
Dr. Chi, my T’ai Chi great grandmaster, was a Christian and a Taoist. He followed The Way, and he also followed the Way. When I first started doing Tai Chi push hands, I noticed how we always allowed the push to turn us, rather than resist it. The Sermon on the Mount had always struck me as one of the greatest passages of wisdom. Very early on in my T’ai Chi studies, I saw that it was a way of turning the other cheek. (I noticed how it was also a way to avoid the machinations of a legalistic mind: who hurt who? Whose fault was this? What would be the correct punishment? And on and on…)
To give some context, the ‘hard’ or ‘external’ martial arts, seek via technique, strength, speed, force, or a combination of these, to overpower or beat an opponent. This can be seen at work in any fight, from bare knuckle boxing, to sports Taekwando.8 ‘Internal’ arts, seek to prevail not by demolishing the opponent, but by transforming the relationship. For instance by using the ‘opponent’s’ energy against them by returning it, by moving along with the attack and subtly diverting it so that it cannot land effectively, using softness, connection, sensitivity and calmness to transform a situation. Arts that sometimes use these methods include T’ai Chi, Ba Gua, Xing Yi, Aikido and some other kung fu methods. Most arts are in reality a mixture of hard and soft methods, it is rare to find someone who is utterly yielding and still impossible to grasp or strike. Dr Chi Chiang Tao was one, apparently, and John Kells was another. What is winning, anyway, when a gun or a bomb would beat any martial art? Why study these archaic methods?
Studying transformation of energy transforms us. What we practice often is largely what we become.
It felt to me like a complete congruence with what I had learned in Sunday school from the Gospels, what I had learned about living by the sword and dying by the sword. I noticed that our tradition took it so much further, until even when you're holding an actual sword, you don't slash back, you join sword to sword, not blocking, feel what’s happening, allow the attack to go past you as you step out of its line, and then you only do the minimum to stop a person carrying on attacking. For instance, at first we always reply with a cut to the wrist, not a fatal strike to the heart.
Working three or four times a week for twenty years with my body, attempting to allow the Tao to move me, rather than my crashing ego, was a massive education. Although I learned physical things quickly, my heart took decades to be truly tempered. I have come to an opinion, based on physical practice and the application of this method to ‘ordinary life’ as well: I think that the heart of the Way (Tao), and the heart of the Way (message of Jesus), are in harmony.9
Non-resistance whilst having an impeccable centre line is what my late Grandmaster would call character, a way of going about in the world, it’s a demeanour, it’s your integrity. That's the thing that doesn't bend even when the body does. In the tenth century, when St. Wite went down to talk to the invading Vikings, saying that her people surrendered and that no further bloodshed need be made, what she had was impeccable internal posture and great warrior spirit, expressed through almost unimaginable courage and lack of self-concern. She's the greatest inspiration to me and I think about her often, because I would want to be able to do the same thing at my own end. I doubt that I could, as yet.
How do we work on this spirit? One push at a time, one affront at a time! When we feel righteous indignation we know we are being given a chance to be upright, whether we yield or step away. This internal method cannot be made into marketable structures and it is no good as a list of instructions, as it does not look the same in all circumstances. The good people of both our paths go to the woods, to the caves when they need to, and they also sometimes go to monastic situations when they need to withdraw.10
There is no shame in stepping away for a while, but the real work is in the world. You can withdraw from the World11, whilst being in the world12. In fact, in my path that's considered the best practice, as the stillness achieved in the midst of civilisation is harder-won.
What you wrote today, there's yielding in it, a yielding in your tone. There's a softness in the heart of it. That’s the paradoxical effect of having a true centre line. I could never have known that I would have to become soft, more than the sum of all the un-armouring I had to do psychologically and physically. To get any softness, or uprightness, to be able to show up in tricky situations, stay connected and yielding, and not just retaliate or block, was quite a mission.
It turns out you can't will yourself into softness. You have to, as your tradition would put it, ‘take up the cross’. The way we would put that is that there's an impeccable centre line, which if you give it up, you've lost your soul. I think it as akin to Casteneda’s ‘place of no (self) pity’. If you take up the sword and hack back, you've lost your soul, whereas if you fall, but in the midst of yielding and non-resistance, that's not a failure. Similarly, when we do stand up for what we truly know to be right, (things that we have given years of our thought, prayer and consideration to, not mere opinions), and when that brings censure and ridicule from those around us, we should not lose heart. We are in good company.
I suddenly remember Cyrano de Bergerac. When he is dying, his last words are, ‘I never dropped my panache…’ He never lost his style, his centre line, his character shone through. It’s, ‘I ain't going out like that!’ There is not exactly a pride in it, but a fastidiousness, perhaps, and certainly a burning spirit.
But when it's at its best, it's not about pride. It is just the right thing to do. I think you're writing about that, as I do, because it matters. These tiny paths that we walk back to sanity by not fighting and by having love in our hearts are The Way. There's a line in the Taoist classics that, after they give you all these pages and pages of details of how to practice, which says you can get enlightenment or become one with the Tao this way or that way... Then it says, ‘but in the end, sincerity is the whole of the method.’ I think that what seemed to shine through in what you wrote this morning was your sincerity, so I am sending you this greeting, in friendship and gladness.
November 2024
This Week’s Good Thing: Islandness, a film by Hannah Close.My Dark Mountain colleague
has shot beautiful footage to make this timely film exploring the ecology, psychology, community and attraction of islands. Shot mainly in Scotland’s Hebrides, it features unique people in these beautiful places, including Iain McGilchrist, on Skye. I’d love for it to become a full feature-length film and she has assembled a great team to edit, score and produce the film. Creative Scotland are match-funding any donations made to the crowdfunder which you can find here.
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Reading pieces by my friends E, A, P and S here has fed into this, many thanks to you all for your good words.
We do not have a common story-telling culture now, and it’s a pity. We do not take good for good and often no longer recognise ill.
Baucis and Philemon comes to mind.
More here about the largest Roman residence north of the Alps.
Including me, a ‘non-believer’. Although I particularly like
‘s phrase from this morning: ‘a mostly-non-Christian-but-not-entirely-not-Christian’ from For all the (female) saints‘Do not resist evil’ (according to the Greek of the New Testament, implying not resisting by legal means rather than outright pacifism, which is one reason why it resonates with my martial arts training…) is from The Sermon on the Mount, which of all the parts of the New Testament is what has stayed in my heart most.
May I always be blessed with friends and family who have a huge divergence of beliefs. The tug on my heart and mind to somehow hold them all in there and keep my centreline, is what keeps me somewhat nimble, and at all tender.
Or in politics.
But I am not saying they are the same thing.
I consider myself to be dual heritage: originally Christian and later Taoist, never following either to ‘the letter’, but very much ‘in spirit’.
The clamour of everyday things.
The fullness of all-things
Thank you for these thoughts! I think I will come back to them a few times. I look forward to watching the islands when I can. I spent a life changing week in the Hebrides almost twenty years ago, on South Uist. I remember thinking: probably no one rich or powerful or influential has ever asked the islanders what is their secret. But they know how to live. In my own way I have tried to remember what I learned there every day since.
This chimes and resonates perfectly with me, walker of a mixed heritage path. The Way and The Way have long felt seamlessly entwined.
I see it like the flow of ancient holloways, holding together the timeless imprints of many pilgrims. Naturally quiescent in stillness and shelter, often empty inside, yielding to storms, sometimes blocked by brambles that unavoidably snag and rip, but full of wonderful windows on the world and so many opportunities to venture out, or deeper in, to engage and to learn.